Ticketybrew tasting notes – 2

Jasmine Green Tea Pale 4.0% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, jasmine green tea, lemon rind, yeast 9/10
Pale yellow, clear, light but effective conditioning. A fresh-tasting golden ale with a bit of body; faint herbal overtones keep things interesting, and there’s a distinctive tannic bitterness on the finish. The overall effect is clean but slightly medicinal, in a good way: the first time I tasted this I was on my way home from a beer festival, and it felt like a healthy choice. (On the other hand, I was on my way home from a beer festival, so my judgment wasn’t perfect.) The bitterness builds: after a while I notice bitterness buzzing on the tip of my tongue between mouthfuls, as well as at the back of my mouth; as I get further down the glass I start to get bitterness at the edges of my tongue as well. A pleasantly bland golden ale in mid-mouth, surrounded on all sides by medicinal bitterness – it’s an interesting combination, and rather pleasant.

Before I go much further with this review of a series of beers with additions, I should say that in general I’m not a fan of beers with additions, particularly where the additions seem designed to replicate flavours that can be found in beers without them – look at all those Christmas beers with cake spices or soft fruit added for flavour, or BrewDog’s Elvis Juice (craft beer that tastes of grapefruit because it’s got grapefruit juice in). So the realisation that the green tea here is carrying some of the aroma and bittering duties that the hops ought to be doing should really put me off this beer. It doesn’t, though, because the beer works so well – really pleasant, drinkable without getting bland or boring. Perhaps they should go the whole hog and leave the hops out – anyone for a Green Tea Gruit?

Marmalade Pale 4% Malted barley, oranges, malted wheat, hops, ginger, spices, yeast 8.5/10
Amber, clear, decent conditioning. Fresh, mildly citric foretaste, building to a substantial sweetish body with a bitter finish. So far, so ‘best bitter’, but I should add that I got bitter oranges in the body and, in a more pronounced form, on the finish; after a while I could taste orange peel on my lips as well. In short, yes, I was tasting the pith.

What impressed me about this was its balance and drinkability. A marmalade beer sounds like a gimmick, and in many brewers’ hands it would be – it’d be a jangle of jammy sweetness, harsh bitterness and obtrusive orange flavouring. This doesn’t have any of those things – it drinks like a best bitter, but one that happens to take a lot its body and bitterness from bitter oranges. It’s a surprisingly unified and un-spiky flavour profile, and it goes down very easy.

Ginger Beer 4.1% No ingredient list (but presumably includes ginger); 500 ml bottle 9/10
Golden, clear, lively conditioning. An initial biscuity heaviness – with just a hint of sweetness – dries out rapidly to something more like a golden ale, with a touch of that ‘gassy’ mineral quality; there’s a bit of soapiness coming through from the ginger, too. A definite but not extreme bitter finish is rounded off very satisfactorily by ginger heat. The overall effect is of a three-way cross between old-school best bitter, pilsner and ginger beer – but a ginger beer that’s been left to ferment out, so that the sweetness has gone but the ginger remains.

I’ve got two touchstones for ginger beer – Marble‘s Ginger Marble and (a distant memory of) Brendan Dobbin’s West Coast alcoholic ginger beer. Neither of them is/was at all sweet, a test which most ‘ginger beer’s fail badly; the West Coast beer, in fact, tasted almost exactly like (an even more distant memory of) home-made ginger beer that had fermented in the bottle. The clean and dry flavours of these beers, backed by the ginger hit on the after-taste, make them serious thirst-quenchers. This one is worthy to stand alongside them.

Peach Iced Tea 4.6% Malted barley, peaches, malted wheat, sugar, hops, tea, yeast 7/10
Golden, slight haze, low but adequate conditioning. Peaches in the aroma, unquestionably; sweetness and fruit in the foretaste. Not sickly or heavy, but doesn’t open up or dry out very much in mid-mouth; becomes a bit fresher, but stays fruity. The bitterness at the end is all tannic, with a touch of herbal perfume (China tea?).

As with the Jasmine Green Tea Pale, my immediate reaction to this is that they’re using additions to get flavours that (with the right malt, the right hops and the right technique) could have been wrung out of malt and hops alone. But let’s park that and just ask whether the beer works. I suppose there are two questions to ask of any beer whose flavour profile is dominated by additions. One is whether you feel like you’re drinking something distinctive, or just a bland base beer with a bunch of flavours dropped on top of it; the other is whether you feel like you’re drinking beer, or the flavourings have taken over to the extent that it might as well be an alcoholic version of (whatever the flavour is). The first of these, the PIT passes with flying colours: it’s an interesting combination of flavours, well combined and none of them obtrusive. On the second I’m less sure; there wasn’t really enough hop character to keep it out of the ‘alco-pop’ zone. Nice stuff, though, and I was still smelling peaches half an hour later.

Summer Fruits Stout 4.6% No ingredient list, but includes raspberries, blackberries and vanilla; 500 ml bottle 9/10
Black, good conditioning. Opens with a sharp – raspberry-flavoured – sourness; as the flavour develops this is replaced by a mellow, dark chocolate bitterness, lightened with some sweetness and a distinct edge of vanilla.

I’m having to rethink my position on beers with additions. I think back to Titanic‘s Damson and Vanilla Stout; despite the obvious similarities, that was nothing remotely like this. The Titanic beer tasted like a stout, but also tasted of damsons – the fruit flavour emerged out of the flavour of the beer. What Ticketybrew seem to be doing with these beers is quite different. The ‘sharp opening, smooth bitter finish’ combo is very characteristic of stouts. What’s unusual about this one is that both the foretaste and the finish come from the additions – just as the sweetish ‘best bitter’ body of the Marmalade Pale comes from the oranges and the dry ‘pale ale’ finish of the Jasmine Green Tea Pale comes from the tea. These are Frankenstein beers, with hops-and-barley flavour profiles duplicated – and heightened – by the use of additions. It’s a really interesting approach, and mostly it seems to be working really well.

Rose Wheat 4.7% Malted barley, malted wheat, hops, yeast, rose water 8.5/10
Pale gold, clear, light carbonation. Sweetish foretaste, perhaps slightly heavier than most of these; develops to a light, fresh flavour with a bit of that lager-like ‘gassy’, almost menthol edge to it. No bitterness on the finish – just more of the same and a return of that (rose water?) sweetness.

Immediate reaction: “Goes down like an absolute dream, and I don’t even like it.” A beautiful beer, and very, very drinkable. I still feel vaguely as if I don’t like it (or maybe just that I ought not to like it?); it’s certainly sweeter than most things I drink, and the rose water addition is the kind of thing you get in those made-up beers marketed at women from time to time. But you can’t argue with an empty glass. It’s just a really nice beer – and I think it is definitely a beer, not an alcoholic carbonated rose water drink. Incidentally, I’m sure I remember an earlier version of this one having more additions – ginger comes to mind – but I’ve got to say it works fine as it is.

Coffee Anise Porter 5.1% Malted barley, malted rye, coffee, hops, star anise, yeast. 8/10
Mahogany brown, nearly opaque, very light but adequate carbonation. A surprisingly straightforward beer, despite the unusual ingredient list (malted rye and all). It starts out like a heavy-ish, dark-ish brown bitter – not much bitterness or overt sweetness – before an aftertaste dominated by the titular coffee and star anise. And repeat – like so many beers on this list, this is a beer that goes down surprisingly easily. The flavours are quite distinctive and wouldn’t automatically combine to make a good beer – in fact the first time I tasted this, on draught, I found the star anise a bit overpowering – but here they work together well. As so often, the secret is balance.

Salted Caramel Coffee Porter 5.4% Malted barley, lactose sugar, malted wheat, coffee, cocoa nibs, hops, yeast, salt. 7.5/10
Mahogany brown, opaque, very light but adequate carbonation (i.e. not flat). Heavy, with both sweetness and salt on the foretaste; doesn’t lighten much but builds to a rich malt-loaf flavour, finishing with bitterness (and a definite hit of coffee), together with a brief return of that salt/sweet combination. Grew on me as I got down the glass; there are some strong and definite flavours bumping into each other here, and the combination initially tasted a bit in-your-face and medicinal. By the end, though, it tastes like itself and nothing but.

Quite full-on, this one – it drinks its strength and then some. I’m not sure I’m really on board with the recent rediscovery of lactose, ‘breakfast stouts’ and all; I feel about this one rather as I felt about Wild‘s Millionaire, that the fact that you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. It’s different, though, and it certainly tastes like you’d expect a salted caramel coffee porter to taste. More to the point, it passes both the tests I mentioned earlier on – it’s a distinctive flavour combination, and there is recognisably a beer underneath it all (the Wild beer didn’t really pass this second test, as I remember). It’s not quite as seamlessly put together as some of the beers here, though.

Drinking this straight after the Spring IPA (see previous post) was interesting. Of the two, this is much more successful as a beer. I still can’t help feeling I’d rather be drinking an IPA that had got pineapple and mango flavours out of hops and malt – rather than out of pineapples and mangoes – but this is a very well put-together beer. So often, flavour additions swamp a beer and turn it into a novelty (looking at you, Marble Mango). This one has certainly got fruit flavours in it, but they don’t overpower the beer at all. (And the bitter finish is presumably just from the hops.)

Minor update 13/8. Seen on a shelf (in Whitby): Tea and Biscuits Mild 3.5% Malted barley, lactose sugar, malted wheat, tea, hops, yeast. BB March ’18, so presumably knocking on a bit. Although I’m an inveterate Ticketybrew-spotter, I didn’t buy it; this was partly because I was about to head off on a walk but mainly because the shop was charging £3 for it (as they were for just about everything else on the shelves). I’m used to paying over £2 for Tb’s small bottles (although it’s always nice when you can get them for under £2), but £3 – for a 3.5%er – was a step too far. Possibly the good people of Whitby felt similarly, which is why those bottles were still on the shelf.